The A&R man who chased the song nobody else could hear - and now funds the Jewish stories nobody else will back.
David Katznelson runs Reboot, a nonprofit that behaves nothing like one. Picture a network of more than 650 Jewish and "Jew-ish" creatives - Hollywood writers, Broadway names, novelists, photographers, composers - all loosely orbiting one question: what does Jewish culture sound like when you let artists rewrite it? Katznelson is the man holding the tuning fork.
In July 2022 he launched Reboot Studios, an in-house engine for film, theater, television, music, photography and publishing. The pitch is blunt and useful: give new Jewish stories the earliest money, the kind that almost never exists. "Reboot Studios is set to be the place where new Jewish stories can get early-stage funding and support," he has said, "which is the hardest support for artists to find." He would know. He spent a career being that money for bands.
The portfolio already includes the pandemic-era sensation "Saturday Night Seder" and the HBO feature "The Survivor." In May 2026, Reboot Studios announced an exclusive partnership with the streaming service ChaiFlicks to push Jewish storytelling to a global audience. For a producer who once fought to get a strange record onto a shelf, the logic is familiar: find the signal, then build the antenna.
What makes him unusual in the philanthropy world is that he does not think culture is a garnish on top of "real" Jewish life. He thinks it is the main course. "Art, at its best, conjures something that's never been experienced," he says. The big questions of a life, he argues, get "processed more in the heart than the brain." So he funds hearts.
His own arc reads like a B-side that became the hit. Reboot did not hire a CEO off a search firm's list. Katznelson grew into the role the slow way - participant, then board member, then board president, then, in 2016, the person actually running it. He had been chairing the board since 2012. By the time he took the corner office he already knew where the bodies and the masters were buried.
Before any of that, there was vinyl. Always vinyl.
"Art, at its best, conjures something that's never been experienced."
It started early and it started loud. While still in high school, Katznelson went to work for Bill Graham Presents, the San Francisco concert empire that ran the rock world's western front. He DJ'd college radio at UC Berkeley, where he took a B.A. in English. Then, in 1991, Warner Bros. Records handed him an A&R desk.
A&R - artists and repertoire - is the job of betting on people before the world agrees with you. Katznelson was good at it. By 1996 he was a Vice President, and the names on his dance card were the kind that define a decade of guitars: The Flaming Lips, Mudhoney, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Texas Tornados, Shane MacGowan, The Boredoms. Not the safe signings. The interesting ones.
In 2000, still inside Warner, he did the thing label men dream about and rarely do - he started his own. Birdman Records became the flagship of the Birdman Recording Group, a small fleet that grew to include Sepia Tone, Tornado and Tariff Records. Birdman was a love letter pressed at 33 RPM: a home for the records he could not stop hearing in his head.
The catalog has a collector's fingerprints all over it. There was MORE OAR, the tribute to lost Moby Grape genius Skip Spence, stacked with Robert Plant, Beck and Greg Dulli. There was the second solo record from John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. These are not safe commercial plays. They are the choices of a man who calls himself, with no apparent shame, a "problematic record collector."
Somewhere along the way, the two halves of his record collection - the indie rock and the cantorial 78s - started talking to each other. The result was the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, which Katznelson co-founded with Roger Bennett, Courtney Holt and Josh Kun.
The name is a tell. Abraham Zevi Idelsohn was the legendary Jewish musicologist who, among other things, gave the world "Hava Nagila." The Society is an all-volunteer outfit run by people from the music industry and academia who believe, in their words, that Jewish history "is best told by the music we have loved and lost." It is record collecting elevated to a form of memory work.
Then came DAWN - an all-night Shavuot celebration he co-founded in San Francisco, where studying ancient text meets a music festival's sense of staying up too late for the right reasons. It ran for six years and became one of Reboot's signature inventions.
By 2016 the side projects had become the main event. He left his post as Director of Strategic Change at the S.F. Jewish Community Federation to take the wheel at Reboot full-time. The trade was deliberate: an institution famous for caution, swapped for one built to remix.
Reboot's reach runs wider than its budget suggests. It helped popularize the National Day of Unplugging, born from the organization's Sabbath Manifesto - a permission slip, basically, to put the phone down for 24 hours. In a world he describes as "on fire," the idea of a deliberate pause has aged remarkably well.
His own description of the mission stays stubbornly plainspoken: Reboot, he says, "reimagines, reinvents and reinforces Jewish culture and traditions for wandering Jews and the world we live in." Note the word wandering. He is not building for the people already inside the building.
An early-stage fund and production house for Jewish stories across film, theater, TV, music and publishing. The money that exists before anyone believes you.
The independent label group he started while still at Warner. Home to the records he loved too much to leave on the cutting-room floor.
An all-volunteer society arguing that Jewish history is best told through the music we have loved and lost. Named for the man who wrote "Hava Nagila."
An all-night Shavuot celebration in San Francisco - text study with a festival's pulse. Ran for six years and became a Reboot signature.
His Substack, @oakiedog. "Stories to read while the world is on fire" - deep dives on lost records, garage-rock labels and the occasional horror film.
Born from Reboot's Sabbath Manifesto: a permission slip to log off for 24 hours. A pause that aged better than almost anything online.
"Reboot reimagines, reinvents and reinforces Jewish culture and traditions for wandering Jews and the world we live in."
"Reboot Studios is set to be the place where new Jewish stories can get early-stage funding and support - the hardest support for artists to find."
"Art, at its best, conjures something that's never been experienced."
The biggest questions of a life, he says, get processed more in the heart than in the brain.
The biography is full of grace notes. He once tried to close a deal with the Detroit garage band The Gories and somehow ended up meeting George Harrison instead - the kind of detour only the record business produces. On his Substack he writes about horror-film history with the same care he gives to obscure 45s, which is to say obsessively.
Online he is @oakiedog, a handle that tells you he never fully traded the crates for the boardroom. The label group still bears the name Birdman. The newsletter still ships. The man who decides which Jewish stories get their first dollar is, at heart, the same kid flipping through bins at a Berkeley record shop, certain the great lost thing is one sleeve away.
That continuity is the point. Katznelson did not abandon music for meaning. He decided they were the same job all along - find the signal in the noise, fund it before the world catches up, and refuse to let the good stuff disappear. Whether the medium is a Skip Spence reissue or a refugee's short film, the ear is the same.